


Definition of the greater good

by Anonymous



Category: Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Fix-It, Gen, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Tony Stark deserves a happy ending
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-15
Updated: 2019-05-15
Packaged: 2020-02-10 01:11:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18649876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: On the TV there is a ceremony presided by the former Prime Minister of the UK (the one that was still Prime Minister when Thanos made him disappear and now is back, trying to stake a claim and a legal precedent that nobody is ready to address). There are Iron Man masks around the general public, so many that it seems like a red and golden sea without waves, everybody is still and solemn and the imagery reminds her of V from Vendetta, which she thinks Tony would have appreciated.“... We will take example,” the almost-not-quite former Prime Minister says. “Nobody dies while is remembered and Iron man will live in our hearts forever.”From behind her, the perfect holographic image of Tony snorts. “Bullshit,” he dismays with Tony’s dilitagized voice.Pepper turns off the TV.Or Pepper goes thorugh at least two stages of grief before Nick Fury's full disclosure.





	Definition of the greater good

It’s Tuesday. Outside the cabin the bright rays of sun evaporate the water rain from the earth and the humidity is almost like a physical presence around her, dense and oppressive. Pepper sits on the sofa with the TV on as Morgan chews some lucky charms carefully evading the pink ones.

She brushes her baby girl’s hair with her fingers, like Tony used to do and she looks up and smiles. It breaks her heart a little but Pepper smiles back without hesitation.

Morgan has Tony’s eyes, dark and deep, full of love and mischief.

On the TV, there is a ceremony presided by the former Prime Minister of the UK (the one that was still Prime Minister when Thanos made him disappear and now is back, trying to stake a claim and a legal precedent that nobody is ready to address). There are Iron Man masks among the general public, so many that it seems like a red and golden sea without waves, everybody is still and solemn and the imagery reminds her of V for Vendetta, which she thinks Tony would have appreciated.

“... We will take example,” the almost-not-quite former Prime Minister says. “Nobody dies while they are remembered and Iron man will live in our hearts forever.”

From behind her, the perfect holographic image of Tony snorts. “Bullshit,” Tony’s dilitagized voice says dismayed.

Pepper leans on and kisses Morgan on the top of her head. These days she only manages to keep her sadness down to manageable levels when her girl is beside her.

“Friday, turn off ‘Daddy’s home’ program.”

“ _ Turning off ‘Daddy’s home’ program _ .”

The hologram disappears and Pepper sighs deeply with nothing that resembles release.

On the TV, someone she doesn’t recognize rants endlessly about Tony’s constant commitment to the greater good.

She groans, a memory of Tony effulgent and over the top partying hard, like nobody else could, mixing booth and sex and rock music with proficient magnetism.

Pepper turns off the TV.

 

* * *

 

 

The world tries to reshape itself into a new normal. 

Yet again. 

There is a new dawn, a bright future, a shiny second chance that humanity on the whole manages to spoil in record time. There is a five year gap difference between half the population, and the initial euphoria of victory soon gives way to resentment and conflict. They won, but the cost of it turns out to be greater than any of them expected, a miscalculation that she is sure Tony would have never overlooked.

Children have been born, people have died, some had moved on and some haven’t but every single person that didn’t disappear changed irreparably during these five years, for better and for worse. There have been contracts, money exchanges, accords signed than only half the world population remember or abide by, and hundreds of thousand of lives are also ruined because they saved them.

There are wars being resurrected by five-year-old feuds, suicides rates are higher than ever and domestic violence is bad. Support groups and hotlines are way over their heads by the sheer amount of people requiring their services; there are more that need help than those who can provide it.

“You should stop that.”

Tony’s hologram smiles sideways at her, with dark sunglasses and a suit that is at least fifteen years old. 

“Stop what?”

She doesn’t really pay attention to him as she keeps scrolling down the latest data of the World Back website.

“Looking for arguments that fortify your resentment.”

Pepper looks up from the screen then, tries to glare it into shame, but it is an impossible task. Tony designed the program with Morgan and his absent father in mind, ready to read their daughter moods and respond to her questions and needs as faithful as Tony would have. It is sophisticated and accurate thanks to a mix of brilliant programming and the uncountable amount of hours of video featuring Tony at their disposal but the program doesn’t work as seamlessly when interacting with her. 

The nuisances of Tony’s complexities are lost in the coding.

“I don’t want a lecture from you.”

The hologram makes an exasperated face and crosses his arms over his chest. “You can’t always get what you want, but sometimes you—”

“No. You are not quoting me a Rolling Stone’s song.”

Pepper can hear her own bitterness in her words. She is hard as metal these days, cold and resentful with anything or anyone that isn’t Morgan. She is made of iron, an Iron Woman, it is less irony than fate.

“What do you want?” he —  _ it _ asks calmly.

She gets up and walks towards this Tony. The hologram is a little taller than he was and when she gets to him she has to look up a little to speak to his face — to  _ its  _ face. There is a lack of warmth, a lack of familiar smell and presence in front of her that burns her from the inside out.

This image is empty, Tony’s presence was immeasurable.

“I want you gone and I want him back.”

Holographic Tony rocks back on his heels and then takes a step back when Morgan enters the room, she is carrying a screwdriver and a broken music box.

“I want to fix this,” she announces.

Digital Tony loses his sunglasses, looks older than he did barely a minute before and smiles.

“I can help you with that.” 

Pepper cringes when he goes through the dinning table as Morgan settles herself on the coffee table but she seems unperturbed by it. Somehow her baby daughter has less difficulties dissociating the spitting image of her dad from the real deal than she has.

“You are doing great, Pumpking, now open that lid, yes, exactly like that.”

She makes fists of her hands and almost runs out of the front door, suddenly needing a rush of fresh air. She braces herself and sucks in a breath charged with frustration and at least half a dozen other emotions that she doesn’t care to classify.

Everything is going to be alright, she repeats to herself like a mantra.  _ She  _ is going to be alright. She promised Tony that much and she intents to keep her word.

 

* * *

 

 

The coming and going of friends and family stops soon enough. Bruce comes once or twice to check on them and Rhodey tries to make time for a visit every couple of weeks. Other than that, it is only Morgan and her, and Happy that comes and goes regularly to help with the most mundane errands and to spoil Morgan as much as he can.

The holographic image of Tony is also always there, she never turns it off these days.

His moving vacant image is barely comforting, like a bandaid for a wound made with a cannon, but it is better than nothing, it is better than the old videos that keep broadcasting on a loop in all major news shows.

She knows she is stalling, that she is trying to preserve a world that no longer exists but within the confines of the cabin there are clothes that still smell like him, the shampoo bottle he last used is still open, a quarter of a pint of his favorite Ben & Jerry flavor remains in the fridge. 

These are little treasures to her that she is not ready to give up just yet.

Tony has been dead for two months when Steve Rogers knocks on her door. 

It’s Thursday.

He is an old man now, with white hair and shaggy skin under his cheekbones but it’s the calm, content resignation of his eyes what shocks her. 

Pepper has heard and seen enough to fill in the gaps in the story that she had been fed about what had happened when Captain America went back to return those damned stones.

“Hi”, he says, his voice sounds almost the same as it did a month ago, when he was so much younger. “May I come in?”

“Sure.” She closes the door behind him carefully, Morgan is taking a nap and the house is completely still. “Let’s go to the kitchen. I’ll make some coffee.”

He follows her in and takes a seat at the kitchen island as she fidgets next to him with the buttons of the complex, Italian, espresso machine.

“I’m sorry, I’m not sure how this works. Only Tony operated it.”

Steve nods with a pity that feels too condescending and she would very much like to punch it out of his face.

“It’s okay, Pepper. It doesn’t matter.”

But it does, because now that Tony is not around she is going to have to learn a bunch of stuff that she wasn’t aware she didn’t know. She closes her eyes for a moment pressing the bridge of her nose and trying not to cry when Steve tries to grab her wrist and out of a reflex she jerks it away.

The shine of the gold band around his finger catches her eyes and she gets short of breath for a second or two, feeling deeply betrayed by the evidence of his happily ever after, the one that Tony didn't get to have with her, in favor of the rest of them.

“It’s okay, I’m okay,” she says.

Steve’s face harders. His whole stance becomes rigid and ready for battle as his eyes focuses somewhere to her right. When she turns her head to check the hologram of Tony is right there, looking as Tony did when he meant serious business.

Yes, well…

The espresso machine miraculously decides that it is the perfect combination of awkwardness and tension to start brewing some coffee. 

“Are you really okay, Pepper?”

She goes to fetch a couple of mugs, going through the hologram just to prove a point. It keeps antagonizing Steve and she should just turn the program off.

She doesn’t. She brings the mugs back and serves coffee for the both of them.

“I am as good as can be expected, I guess.”

She sits besides him, puts her hands around the warm mug, the smell of coffee reminds her of Tony, like the smell of motor oil or soldering tin. 

The silence stretches with the words that neither of them dare to say. The pain is still too fresh, at least for her. He had lived a whole life while she grieved, had earned deep, laugh wrinkles and age spots on his hands that the father of her child will never get to have. 

“You have set quite the security perimeter out there,” he finally ventures with studied disinterest. “It was somewhat of a trial to get here.”

“I went to the city a few weeks ago and we had some minor incidents with some people following me back. Morgan’s security and well-being is my main concern now.”

Steve nods, once. “Of course.” 

Like he understands what it is to have to fight your way back home when people stand in your way, wanting something from you: an explanation, a solution, a sad picture to sell more copies of some magazine. Or maybe he does, she doesn’t know anything of his life now.

“We are worried, Pep. Everybody cares about you.” He keeps looking at the hologram like it is the source of everything that is currently wrong in her life.

“ _ We _ ?”

“Everybody.”

“Oh yes. Absolutely everybody worries about me. The papers, and the talk show hosts, and the people who call radio stations to express their deep condolences for me, like I’m a national widow. The new Jacqueline Kennedy. A token of their own misery. Someone to pity from afar so not to look at their own sadness.”

She is neither the representative of their grief nor the role model of moving on, and it angers her, all those strangers that are feeling sorry for her but alive, instead of Tony; all the friends that no longer can hold her gaze, the sacrifice that in the end only Vision, Natasha and Tony had to make, it all angers her.

She looks at holographic Tony for a moment and finally gives up.

“Friday, turn off ‘Daddy’s home’”.

“ _ Turning off ‘Daddy’s home’ now _ .”

“Pepper—”

“Why didn’t you do anything?” She asks, there is venom in her words and she tries to keep it at bay before speaking again. “Afghanistan and New York and Sokovia. You knew they were all coming and you did nothing.”

He takes a deep breath, his chest expanding beyond any reasonable measure, like the man he once was. Doesn’t look at her but at some distant, fixed point head of him, maybe thinking of another place or another time.

“It doesn’t work like that.”

He sounds resentful but is not nearly enough to appease her loss.

“Well. It doesn’t really work like this either.”

 

* * *

 

 

They move back to New York on a sunday, or to be more accurate  _ she  _ moves back to New York since Morgan has never lived in the city before. They take resident in the last floor of the Avengers Tower that had been vacant for almost six years now. 

The big towers of cristal and steel, the noise, the modern, white furniture reminds her of a distant time so long ago, that she feels less acutely Tony’s absence. 

They have company too. Bruce resides there, in his own floor with his own at-home lab, Rhodey too. Happy is comfortable settled in one of the apartments and taking care of security and Wanda is around the place, somewhere, even if they never cross paths; their sadness is too obvious, their grief too raw to be in each other’s company without adding to each others pain.

Morgan cries sometimes at night, not much, but sometimes she longs for a goodnight routine that her father was in charge of and the best that she can do is to try and fall short.

“I miss Daddy,” she says with sleep in her eyes.

“I miss him too, Pumpkin.”

When she goes back to the living room holographic Tony is looking out of the window to the landing deck as if expecting something happening. 

She sinks into the couch, her bare feet on the coffee table as she pulls out her tablet.

“I have stored ten messages from Tony Stark addressed to you, to play at your convenience, given that certain criteria are met.”

“Criteria?” she asks at a lost of what else to say.

“Milestones,” the hologram says. “Or certain amount of time passed. Do you want for me to play the first one?”

Pepper looks at the calendar on her starkpad. It’s been exactly three months since Tony’s passing and suddenly she finds breathing is as difficult as swallowing needles, an herculean job.

“No.” She shakes her head and focuses on the work she has to do. “No. I need to get this done.”

The relocation of as much reappeared Stark Industries personnel as possible in the minimum time achievable is a priority, and she has to prepare a meeting with the board to address all the contingencies, go through all Tony’s unfinished projects and assign them to the appropriate teams. 

She doesn’t have the time to spent the night crying, or getting miserably wasted.

She has met Tony for the better part of her life and she is beginning to fear that the first time she told him a lie that wasn’t one of omission, was when she said to him that they were going to be alright. 

She doesn’t feel like she is going to be alright, not anytime soon.

Rhodey comes to see them the next afternoon. He plays with Morgan for an hour and talks business with her for another forty five minutes before addressing the holographic elephant in the room. The image of Tony seats on the bar dressed with jeans and a Black Sabbath t-shirt, observant, silent. He,  _ it _ rarely speaks to anybody that is not Morgan or herself.

Rhodey looks at it like he wants to challenge it for a duel.

“You know it is not him, right?”

Pepper sighs. She is too tired to pretend that she is in a better place than she really is. Too fed up of people trying to rush her into getting over her grief.

“It’s what I have left.”

 

* * *

 

 

It’s a sunny monday morning and the wind smell like autumn is approaching, but the leafs of the trees are still green and the temperature is still warm enough.

Pepper goes back to work to the same office that she left six years ago, the office that was once Tony’s and that is full of happy memories and echoes of the past. She sits on the big table and it is almost like she can hear Tony thinking while laying on the coach, feel the goosebumps of her skin when he whispered innuendo in her ear.

When she walks the hallways, people offer their condolences with their own sadness welling their eyes and she feels the imperious need to run away, get into her Rescue armour and fly away.

Instead she works, hard, and at the end of the day she gets into the limousine to head back home, if she starts to cry, ugly, bitter tears that mess her professional make up as she sobs before Happy can start the car, it is not like anyone can blame her.

She tries to silence her whimpers by biting hard into her lower lip. The space feels empty and infinite around her, cold, and then Happy gets into the back seat next to her. The car hasn’t even moved yet.

“Pep. Hey, Pep.”

He takes her hands in his, that are warm and calloused like Tony’s were but feel nothing like Tony’s fingers.

“It’s alright.” She tries to convince the both of them as she keeps on crying. “I’ll be alright.”

Happy runs his hands up and down her arms in a comforting gesture and a couple of minutes later she begins to feel less alone, less lost and she is able to restrain her sadness enough to stop the tears from running down her cheek.

“I was thinking—” Happy says and then stops himself, looks sheepishly at her. “I was thinking I’d like to pay my respects to Tony.”

She blinks once, twice. For a moment the meaning of the sentence is lost on her.

“You know, carry some flowers, or… I don’t know, a can of motor oil.”

She chuckles as she wipes thes rest of her ruined mascara from under her eyes. 

She has never been one for cemeteries, only visited her parent’s graves once when she was in her twenties, but Happy is a traditional sort of guy, and she knows there are many people who find comfort visiting the resting place of a loved one.

“I don’t think a can of oil would sit well with the lake,” she says smiling a little.

“No, I wasn’t thinking about the lake, but I don’t know where…” He makes a convoluted gesture of his hand instead of speaking the words.

“Oh.”

It downs on her that he is asking about an actual, physical grave, and then her mind blanks, baffled at her own carelessness. 

There was the battle. She remembers saying goodbye to Tony and Rhodey hugging her as Steve picked up Tony’s unmoving body like a ragged doll. She remembers the texture of the rubble under her knees and the smell of burned flesh, and thinking that that body that was been carried away couldn’t possibly be Tony, because he was never that still. Never.

Then she flied  back to Morgan and hugged her daughter for ages until they both fell asleep.

She remembers putting a brave face, the message and the ceremony by the lake... and nothing else.

Fury has never informed her of what they did with Tony’s body.

“I’ll ask SHIELD,” she says, and wonders at all the kind of tests that the organization might have inflicted on him. An autopsy, for sure, God knows what else.

She is not certains she cares to know the answers.

 

* * *

 

 

It is a saturday a month away from Morgan’s birthday when she comes across Tony’s calculation for time travel. It is not like she is looking for them but it is not like she is not looking for them either. The annotations are messy but she has been fluent in his thinking patterns for years, enough to make some sense of it.

“That was password protected,” says holographic Tony with a blank expression on his digital face.

She glares back at him. At  _ It _ . If Tony hadn’t want for her to be able to open the file only Shuri might had have a crack at it. “I am resourceful.”

“Time travel is messy, and dangerous.”

She hasn’t been contemplating time-travel, not really, but Morgan’s birthday is approaching and the three of them alway spend the day outdoors, Tony dotings on Morgan’s every whim. The schematics flow in front of her. The uneasiness of wanting the impossible piling up inside her.

No. 

No.

But what if, what if,  _ what if _ …

She makes a gesture of her hand and Friday closes Tony’s project leaving nothing but thin  air behind.

“Don’t look at me like that,” she says to the hologram, to an empty room.

“I am literally not looking at you. In any way.”

She is not in the mood for talking in roundabouts. “If you want to say anything, just say it”

“ _ Want _ is not in my programming, not really.”

“And what is in your programming exactly?”

“Telling you that time-travel is not worth it. Is messy and dangerous for the greater good.”

God, she is nurturing a headache and bickering with a digital image of someone who is not there anymore. Maybe this is how madness, true madness, begins.

“I want you to play me the first message from Tony. Now,” she says before knowing what she is going to say. Right now she needs the reassurance that Tony was real and different to this shadow that follows Morgan around whenever she feels like playing.

The hologram looks at her for a moment before disappearing into thin air and another image of him appears. He looks tired, and his wrinkles are deep around the eyes when he smiles at her.

“Hi Honey,” he starts, in a flippant way, and just that little detail is so quintessential Tony that she falls in love with him all over again. “So it seems that I’m dead, with to be frank is something that we both knew was coming, in fact this is the twenty fourth version of this message. I hope I died doing something really heroic but just in case I died doing something really, really stupid I want you to remember all the other heroic stuff that I’ve done, you know. I’m a hero, I think we all should agree on that. And great in bed, let’s not forget that part either.”

Tony, her Tony, smiles brightly and moves his hands in a combination of movements that are random and also very familiar.

“I really hope that you can forget me and not be resentful of my many stupid choices. What is done, is done.”

She chuckles. “Says the man who travelled back in time.” There are tears in her eyes.

“So there are some things I think I’ve never told you before. Let me see, first; I’ve loved you for a long, long time. Almost from the start and loving you has saved my life more times that I can count in more ways than on. It was your voice, the memory of you what kept me alive in that cave in Afghanistan and the thought of you what kept me from taking one too many pills back when I was a complete douchebag, so yeah, I truly, deeply, love you and thank you so much. You are the prove that I had a heart all along.”

Pepper is completely transfixed by his words, by his unique intonation, by the way his little, boyish smile still gets her.

“Second: before Morgan was born you were the most important person in the universe, now you share the honor. I hope I did what it took. I hope you can be somehow proud of me, that our daughter can be proud of who she is as she grows up. I tried. I really, really tried, even when I failed spectacularly, I tried. And third: I know it hasn’t always been easy, to be by my side, you know better than most that regrets and obsessions make lousy companions, don’t hang with them for long. Miss me, but don’t miss me too much.”

He winks at her, smiles and disappears. Pepper swears that if he wasn’t already dead she would kill her for making her love him like this.

She goes upstairs, to Morgan’s room, seats on the floor by her side as she plays with her a game for designing simple circuits intended for kids older than her.

“You know I love, Don’t you, Pumpkin?”

“Yes. I love you too, Mommy.”

She brushes her daughter’s dark hair out of her face and behind her ear.

“What do you want this year for your birthday?”

She looks up, those big, brown, beautiful eyes looking at her like she could make the universe tic and tac at her whim. “Daddy said we could build a car,” she says, her smile so big, her hands clasping as she rocks from side to side with uncontained excitement.

“We will see about that.”

Tony’s hologram is in a corner of the room. “I could help with it.”

She doesn’t say another word. Kisses the top of her daughter’s head and leaves the room before her eyes start to well up again. Pepper goes to their own room,  _ her  _ own room and strips all her clothes. Her skin feels itchy and suffocating as she steps under the hot water of the shower spray. She brushes the sponge against her arms and legs until they are red and raw, and then turns the temperature down until it hurts to stand under the water. Until she can’t think of anything but how cold her fingers and toes are.

“Friday, open Tony’s calculation for time-travel again.”

She is on the bed doing a seated butterfly with her bathrobe on and her damped hair.

“The data you are trying to access is password protected.”

“Password is  _ three thousand _ ,” she says, her voice barely quivering.

“Accessing the data now.”

The Möbius strip glows in the middle of the room.

What if.

Oh God,  _ what if _ ...

 

 

* * *

She finally manages to set an appointment with Nick Fury for a friday. After going through a couple of hiccups over the phone and three carefully redacted emails, SHIELD gives her the necessary directions to a previously undisclosed location  for the meeting. All in all, it is easier than she expected but It seems that being almost a superheroine herself give her some kind of leverage within the SHIELD hierarchy that she wasn’t really aware of.

The place is an hangar on the outside, in the inside is clean and polished, with high ceilings and luminous hallways that open to wide rooms. She walks with confidence, smiling to every single person that acknowledges her presence with a quick nod until she is directed to a big office with a solemnity that is almost comical, and offered a coffee while she waits for the Director to grace her with his presence.

There is a big table in the middle of the room, three chairs and nothing much for furniture, the takes a seat and looks around the soundproof walls, probably bulletproof too. The place is so sterile that it could be an operating theater and she wonders where are the traces of Natacha’s presence as acting director for the last five years. 

She was a friend and a more gracious human being than she was given credit for. If things had been different, if they’d had still time they would have seated with a drink in their hands commiserating together on the stupidity of humankind and its predictability to fuck up. Pepper shakes the thought out of his mind and reminds herself to drink a couple of shots of vodka in her honor as soon as she is out of this place. 

When the door finally opens the one who enters the room is not Nick Fury, but Maria Hill.

“Good morning, Mrs Stark.”

“Pepper is fine.” It is a reflex, she never changed her last name.

“Do you mind if I take this seat?”

“Well it is certainly not taken.”

Hill smiles, not sweetly but with efficient politeness, as she seats next to her and Pepper heart rate spikes up. She has come to learn that It is never a good sign when SHIELD wastes times with niceties.

“I’m sorry, I thought I was meeting with Mr. Fury.”

Maria crosses her hands over her lap, her fingers crossing like a piece of well oiled machinery and looks at her in the eye with the same kind of calming, comforting charm that she has usd over the years to engage difficult negotiators. Pepper straightens her back, getting ready for the next blow.

“Director Fury will meet with you later. I am here to discuss your present status as Rescue.”

“I have a little girl. I don’t intent to fly around at SHIELD’s whims.”

Hill flinches, almost imperceptibly “Under no circumstances whatsoever?”

“No. Not at the present moment.”

The other woman whole demeanor becomes something similar combat stance in the blink of an eye.

“Not even if it is for the greater good was at stakes?”

She bites hard her tongue and counts to ten. “One of these days somebody is going to have to give me the appropriate definition of the greater good, because after five new armed conflict were declared within the last two months, the three massive bombings last week and my husband’s death I am really struggling to find one.”

Maria Hill freezes, just for the tiniest of moments but it is enough to know that there is something incredibly wrong. She has a way with words, but not the kind of way to makes this woman skip a beat.

María nods once and gets up with a fluid motion. “We’ll discuss this again in the future.”

The door opens again as Nick Fury enters the scene. She has been in through enough hostile takeovers to recognize the perfect timing for what it is, a carefully traced plan of action.  He sits on the table in front of her with his legs wide apart and skips all introductions.

“I thought we’d have a little more time before we had to have this conversation.”

No. She thinks, please God No.

She makes fists of her hands, her nails digging into her own flesh, she struggles to keep her breathing even as her mind reels with every possible bad news that she about to receive.

“I just want to know when I can have my husband’s body back. We’d like to bury him in the Stark family grave.”

The words hurt a little less than she thought they would.

“Yes, about that.” Fury doesn’t pause, doesn’t hesitate in his discourse. “Did you ever learned anything about project Tahiti?”

“No.”

“It was a contingency plan in case of the death of an Avenger.”

The words echo in her head. There is a faint ringing in her ears and she can feel her blood pulsating through her veins. Her knuckles are white. She uses her fear and her hope to remain focussed.

“What have you done?” She doesn’t stutter. Her voice is clean and clear like a surgical knife.

“All that we could. We don’t know if he is going to be okay yet, but Tony Stark is alive.”

 


End file.
